Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  Steadfast in his commitment to Vietnam, Rumsfeld supported Nixon’s policy of drawing down the US troop presence there while returning responsibility for the war to the South Vietnamese. The implosion of Nixon’s presidency, culminating in his resignation, robbed this “Vietnamization” policy of whatever slight congressional support it had enjoyed.

  Nixon’s resignation brought a job change for Rumsfeld, who was recruited to become Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff in 1974. In this post, he witnessed the Saigon regime’s final collapse, which he blames on a spineless Congress. Even now, Rumsfeld does not question Vietnam’s necessity, referring to the war not as a mistake or a failure but, instead, describing the outcome as a “withdrawal” and “retreat.”

  With the passing of time, Vietnam looks more and more like an inexplicable march to folly or at best a vast, sorrowful tragedy. To Rumsfeld, it became “a symbol of American weakness” and “an invitation to further aggression.” In Asia, Africa and Latin America, the Soviet Union wasted no time in exploiting that weakness, with academic and opinion leaders turning a blind eye. Rumsfeld was not surprised. “Sympathy for the Soviets,” he writes, had been “a longstanding sentiment among the American elite.”

  In late 1975, Rumsfeld moved again, this time to the Pentagon as defense secretary. His aim was to slow the Soviet onslaught and to restore US military credibility, an effort that found him at cross-purposes with just about everyone: hidebound generals, congressmen in hock to defense contractors and devotees of détente such as secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

  Ford’s defeat by Jimmy Carter sent Rumsfeld back to Chicago and private life. For the next two decades, he made money as a successful chief executive of Searle pharmaceuticals, served as an occasional envoy (including a notorious mission in 1983 “to cultivate warmer relations with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq”), and agitated from the sidelines against any hint of pusillanimity. Rumsfeld’s brisk account of his years out of power form an awkwardly inserted parenthesis. His eagerness to get back in the game is palpable, as suggested by his own abortive bid for the presidency in 1988.

  In 2001, that chance finally came when George W. Bush returned him to the Pentagon as defense secretary. All the old problems remained: the previous administration had gutted defense, responded ineffectually to provocations, and allowed itself to be cowed by generals who remained stuck in the past. Rumsfeld’s initial charge was to fix all that, investing US forces with greater “agility, speed, deployability, precision, and lethality.” Preoccupied with this task—the enemy he worried about most was a change-averse bureaucracy—Rumsfeld failed to anticipate and did nothing to thwart the events of September 11, 2001.

  Still, the 9/11 attacks reaffirmed his thesis: once again, weakness had proven provocative. The overarching purpose of “the war on terror”—Rumsfeld now regrets the name, preferring war against “violent Islamists”—was to demolish once and for all the perception that the US was some sort of patsy. Projecting toughness, rather than promoting democracy, defined the object of the exercise. Rumsfeld simply wanted to show the locals who was boss—the Bush Doctrine of “anticipatory self-defense” conferring the necessary grant of authority—and then move on. Transforming the US military to assert unquestioned global supremacy ranked well ahead of transforming the Muslim world by exporting liberal values.

  Although Rumsfeld is fond of using the term strategy, what becomes apparent is that the Bush administration never developed anything resembling an actual strategy after 9/11. To get its message across, Rumsfeld simply wanted the US to crack heads whenever and wherever the need arose. If that implied a military effort lasting decades, that was all right with him.

  The initial success achieved by the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan seemingly demonstrated the feasibility of this approach. Even so, Rumsfeld struggles to explain the haste with which Bush shifted his attention to Iraq. Two weeks after 9/11, he reports, the president was privately urging his Pentagon chief to put Saddam at the top of the list of those needing to have their heads cracked. That Saddam was actively stockpiling weapons of mass destruction (WMD) fell into the category of “known knowns,” with the question of when to pass a nuclear device to terrorists his to decide. In any event, no such weapons existed. Rejecting charges that the administration lied about the Iraqi WMD program, Rumsfeld writes, “The far less dramatic truth is that we were wrong.” Acquitting the administration of dishonesty, he enters a plea of incompetence. The emphasis on WMD turned out to be a “public relations error.”

  Much the same applies to his cursory treatment of matters such as torture and detention. He says critics misunderstood or willfully distorted the truth, or misleadingly implied that unfortunate incidents such as Abu Ghraib were more than mere aberrations. Again, if there was fault to be found, it lay in the realm of PR: “Half-truths, distortions and outright lies were too often met with little or no rebuttal.” Rumsfeld’s conscience remains clear.

  To disguise its failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the administration “changed the subject to democracy promotion”—a position Rumsfeld thought wrong-headed. In his own estimation, his views didn’t carry that much weight. Although offering nothing but praise for Bush (and describing Dick Cheney as “uniquely influential” without ever explaining what the vice-president contributed), Rumsfeld describes the national security team on which he served as deeply dysfunctional. He is unsparing in his criticism of Colin Powell, portraying him as personally weak and captive to a cowardly, if not traitorous, State Department. “Powell tended not to speak out” at National Security Council meetings and seemed reluctant to express any disagreement with Bush.

  Yet Rumsfeld reserves his most scathing attacks for Condoleezza Rice, depicted as out of her depth and given to twaddle. At one NSC meeting, in the presence of a cringing Rumsfeld, Rice announced that “human rights trump security.” In interagency disputes, the national security adviser “studiously avoided forcing clear-cut decisions,” preferring a “bridging approach” that maintained superficial harmony while papering over differences. Her shop became a black hole in which little if anything got done. Here lay the real explanation for why Iraq became something akin to a replay of Vietnam. In short, don’t blame Rumsfeld: nobody was paying him any attention.

  Above all, after Saddam’s fall, Rumsfeld argued in vain for a prompt exit. He rejected comparisons of Iraq to Germany or Japan in 1945—midwifing Arab democracy was never going to be easy. His own preferred model was France in 1944: liberate and quickly transfer sovereignty to someone qualified to exercise it. Although never venturing who he had in mind for the role of Charles de Gaulle, Rumsfeld wants it known that Ahmed Chalabi, the shifty Iraqi exile leader, was never his candidate.

  Absolving himself of responsibility for the ensuing debacle finds Rumsfeld disowning the very people he chose to implement US policy in occupied Iraq. He describes as “inexplicable” the appointment of Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, an officer of indifferent ability, to command all US forces in the theatre. (In his own memoir, Sanchez writes that Rumsfeld personally interviewed him for the post.) L. Paul Bremer, Rumsfeld’s choice for the position of US pro-consul in Baghdad, turned out to be arrogant, insubordinate, and dishonest. In perhaps the book’s most audacious passage, Rumsfeld summarizes his complaint with Bremer while simultaneously placing himself on the side of the angels: he found it difficult, he writes, to get Bremer to “accept the idea that Iraq belonged to Iraqis, and that Iraqis were entitled to their own culture and institutions.”

  Rumsfeld also had problems with pundits and retired generals who charged him with refusing to provide the numbers of troops needed for the mission. The charge was false; Rumsfeld insists that he was open to sending reinforcements if they were needed. Again and again he asked commanders in the field if they had any unfilled needs but never received “any responses that they wanted more forces or that they disagreed with the strategy.” Granted, there was the odd slip of the tongue—it turns out that his “stuff ha
ppens” reaction to anarchy in Baghdad, interpreted as flippant, was his way of paying tribute to the transition “between the old order and the new.” Yet, on balance, Rumsfeld judges his performance as largely without fault.

  Anyway, in the end, it was all worth it. Venturing into the realm of unknown unknowns, Rumsfeld conjures lurid images of all that might have happened had the US not invaded Iraq, offering a veritable litany of apocalyptic possibilities. Above all, by conveying weakness, inaction would have paved the way for Islamists to erect a “single theocratic empire that imposes and enforces sharia.” Instead, by toppling Saddam, Rumsfeld writes with characteristic certainty, the US “has created a more stable and secure world”—a judgment not sustained by recent and ongoing developments in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  “I don’t spend a lot of time in recriminations, looking back or second-guessing decisions,” Rumsfeld writes. Neither does he evidently devote much time to serious reflection. Known and Unknown is tendentious rather than instructive. The reader who wades in should expect a long, hard slog, with little likelihood of emerging on the far side appreciably enlightened. Rather than seriously contemplating the implications of the events in which he participated, Rumsfeld spends more than eight hundred pages dodging them.

  That ham-handed and ill-advised US policies rather than perceived weakness might endanger American security; that weakness itself might be a self-inflicted wound, incurred as a result of embarking upon reckless or unnecessary wars; that self-restraint might preserve or even enhance genuine strength: even to suggest these possibilities is to call into question the pernicious known knowns to which Rumsfeld so desperately clings, even if doing so causes incalculable damage to the country he professes to love.

  ____________

  1. Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011).

  10

  Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter

  Tailors to the Emperor

  (2011)

  President Kennedy was categorical on the subject. Speaking at American University in Washington, DC, on June 10, 1963, he put it this way: “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.” Twenty years later, President Reagan concurred. “The defense policy of the United States,” he told Americans on March 23, 1983, “is based on a simple premise: the United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor.” Given such authoritative (and bipartisan) assurances, how then can we explain the George W. Bush administration’s promulgation of a doctrine of preventive war at the start of the twenty-first century? The simple answer, of course, is that 9/11 changed everything. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage articulated a feeling that was widespread among Americans after the events of September 11: “History starts today.” All bets were off. So too were the gloves. Deterrence and defense no longer sufficed. As President Bush himself put it, “the doctrine of containment just doesn’t hold water.” Self-protection was not good enough. In Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s typically crisp formulation, “the best—and, in some cases, the only—defense is a good offense.” This was one of those cases. In order to prevent another 9/11—or something even more nightmarish—the United States had no choice but to go permanently on the offensive. With the Bush Doctrine, Washington granted itself the authority to do just that. End of story.

  But the truth is more complicated. In fact, the Bush Doctrine possesses a considerable provenance. Its gestation period coincided with the Age of Overkill—the years when authorities in Washington made nuclear-strike capacity the cornerstone of US national security policy and then, more or less as an afterthought, assessed the implications of having done so. The effort to wrestle with those implications, which turned out to be vast and troublesome, gave birth to a new tradition of strategic thought. Acknowledging the influence of its chief midwife, Albert Wohlstetter, that tradition can rightly be called the Wohlstetter School.

  A filmmaker attempting a behind-the-scenes portrayal of US strategy in the nuclear age would surely give Albert Wohlstetter a place of prominence—although that place would likely be a bland faculty lounge instead of the Pentagon’s bells-and-whistles War Room. Wohlstetter was the quintessential defense intellectual. From the 1950s through the 1990s, he wielded outsized influence in policy circles, without himself ever shouldering the burdens of personal responsibility—an outsider enjoying privileged inside access. Born in New York in 1913, he was a mathematician by training, who rose to prominence while an analyst at RAND, which he joined in 1951. (RAND also employed his wife, the historian Roberta Wohlstetter.) In 1964, Wohlstetter joined the political science faculty at the University of Chicago. There he remained for the rest of his career, training acolytes (among them Paul Wolfowitz) and mentoring protégés (among them Richard Perle), while engaging in classified research, advising government agencies and serving on blue-ribbon commissions—in general leaving his fingerprints all over the intellectual framework of US national security strategy.

  “Paul thinks the way Albert thinks,” Perle once remarked, referring to his friend Wolfowitz. This comment applied equally to more than a few others who rose to positions of prominence in Washington during the latter half of the twentieth century. In national security circles, Albert’s way of thinking became pervasive. So too did the abiding theme of his work: the existing situation is bad; absent drastic action today, it is almost sure to get worse still tomorrow. To those who learned from, collaborated with, or drew inspiration from Albert Wohlstetter, therefore, any defensive posture by definition is either inadequate or soon will be. The defender forfeits the initiative, a defensive orientation too easily translating into passivity, inertia and even fatalism. In an age in which survival required constant alertness and continuing exertion to improve existing capabilities and devise new ones, to rely on defense alone as a basis for strategy was to incur great risk.

  For members of the Wohlstetter School, the advent of the Bush Doctrine represented the culmination of a project that they had pursued over the course of decades. Long before the events of September 2001, ideas they had developed set the stage for the United States to embrace preventive war. For Wohlstetter’s adherents, the proactive elimination of threats—thereby transcending concepts such as containment and deterrence—had long since acquired a tantalizing allure all of its own. Well before 9/11, they had persuaded themselves that preventive war was not only desirable but also feasible. All that was needed was an opportunity to put their theories into practice. On September 11, 2001, that opportunity presented itself.

  Preemptive War

  Commencement ceremonies for the graduating cadets at West Point on June 1, 2002, provided the occasion for Bush to unveil his doctrine of preventive war. Bush began by paying tribute to Presidents Kennedy and Reagan. Rather than recalling their assurances that the United States would never start a war, however, he praised them for refusing “to gloss over the brutality of tyrants” and giving “hope to prisoners and dissidents and exiles.” In a difficult time, they had held high the torch of freedom. In some respects, the challenges now confronting the United States mirrored those that his Cold War predecessors had faced. “Now, as then,” Bush declared, “our enemies are totalitarians. . . . Now, as then, they seek to impose a joyless conformity, to control every life and all of life.” Yet in other crucial respects, the present situation was entirely new and fraught with unprecedented danger. Bush located the nexus of that danger “at the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology.” Against such a threat, Cold War strategies no longer sufficed. “Containment is not possible,” the president continued, “when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.”

  In such circumstances, defense alone was inadequate to provide security. Passivity was tantamount to courting suicide. “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” New conditions had rendered the promises of Kennedy and Reagan null and vo
id. “We must take the battle to the enemy,” Bush continued, “disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.” Action necessarily implied military action, and the president emphasized the imperative of transforming the armed forces to create a military “ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world” and prepared “for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.” Military forces in action would eliminate the terrorist threat; military might in itself would guarantee the peace: “America has, and intends to keep, military strength beyond challenge . . . thereby, making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.”

  Lending this happy prospect a modicum of plausibility were newly emergent methods of waging war—precise, agile, flexible and discriminating—which Bush thought would endow US forces with hitherto unimagined levels of effectiveness. Released from the paralyzing effects of Hiroshima, war—undertaken by Americans for enlightened purposes—would acquire a new lease on life, the United States seizing the moment, in Bush’s words, “to extend a just peace, by replacing poverty, repression and resentment around the world.” The Bush Doctrine promised both to unharness American power and to invest it with renewed moral purpose. However unwittingly, Bush had thereby summarized and endorsed the several principles of the Wohlstetter School. The implementation of the Bush Doctrine in the months and years that followed put those principles to the test.

  Peril and Surprise

  Four essential precepts define the Wohlstetter tradition. The theme of the first is looming peril. According to its adherents, America’s enemies, strong and getting stronger, are implacably hostile and will, if given the chance, exploit any perceived US vulnerability; to make matters worse, US officials responsible for evaluating the threats bearing down on the country routinely underestimate the actual danger, lulling the American people into a false sense of security. In reality, crisis is a permanent condition, the threats facing the United States imminent and existential. The theme of the second precept is surprise, which greatly complicates the problem of how to gauge the danger. The prospect of the unforeseen is omnipresent and can never be entirely eliminated. Although efforts to guard against being caught unawares are essential, to assume that those efforts are succeeding is to invite disaster. Only those defenses that will work in the absence of warning can be deemed sufficient.